Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population

MIGRATION: 144 Cuban Emigres Repatriated in Less Than One Week

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, May 22 1998 (IPS) - The latest batch of 61 undocumented Cuban emigrants brought the total to 144 sent home this week by the governments of the United States and the Bahamas.

The repatriation operations are in line with migration agreements that Cuba signed with the United States in May 1995, and in January 1996 with the Bahamas, which in the past has served as a springboard into the U.S. state of Florida.

The accords followed an August 1994 exodus of thousands of Cubans who sought to reach the United States by sea, and are designed to avoid a new refugee crisis and stem the continuing trickle of emigres.

Cuba’s state-run television reported the arrival to Havana Thursday of 61 Cubans intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard off the coast of the Bahamas in their attempt to reach the United States by sea – the third group returned home since Monday.

The 18 emigres – 15 men and three women – handed over to Cuban migration authorities by Washington this week brought the total of those returned after being intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard to 936.

The Bahamas, meanwhile, deported 126 people who had spent several months in a detention centre in that Caribbean island nation, including 93 men, 20 women and 13 children.

“The government of the Bahamas is interested in complying with the memorandum of understanding on migration issues signed with Cuba,” Carlton Wright, the secretary of immigration in the Bahamas, said in Havana.

The Bahamas has repatriated 550 Cubans since the signing of the memorandum of understanding, which outlines regulations on migration aimed at preventing hazardous sea journeys by undocumented emigrants seeking eventually to reach the United States.

After a lull since last December, Nassau renewed deportations this week, immediately drawing fire from Cuban exile groups in the United States working to obtain visas from other countries for the emigres.

The Cuban government has not confirmed the possible deportation of baseball players Angel Lopez, Jorge Diaz and Michael Jova, as well as coach Enrique Chinea, who set out from the island on a rickety boat in early March.

The players were keen on following in the footsteps of Orlando Hernandez, known as ‘El Duque’, who was granted asylum in Costa Rica early this year before winning a 6.6 million dollar contract with the New York Yankees.

But the government of the Bahamas and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (ACNUR) concluded that Lopez, Diaz, Jova and Chinea did not fulfill the requisites for political asylum.

This week’s deportations coincided with Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Aleman’s announcement that the doors of his country were always open to Cuban refugees. “Nicaragua’s doors are open to whoever is seeking freedom, because we have also suffered dictatorship and persecution,” Aleman said in Miami, where he was invited by the fervently anti-Castro Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF).

In the name of CANF, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States, Jorge Mas Santos said the Foundation would pay “whatever is necessary to transfer these people to Nicaragua.”

The ‘New Herald’, published in Miami, reported that around 135 undocumented Cubans apparently remained in the Detention Centre located on Carmichael Road in Nassau, Bahamas.

George Stuart, under-secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, said Thursday that “the letter from Managua” arrived after offices had closed and the deportation papers had been issued.

 
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